Arizona Real Estate Notebook

I’ve been wondering if there was a way to short New York residential real estate.

The demise of all of the big 5 investment banks and their astronomical compensation even to mid-level employees will take away an important market for luxury real estate in New York. (Some of the investment banks converted to commercial banks to save their bacon, however, commercial banks don’t pay like the investment banks used to.)

Now I read that the New York condo market is set for a crash.

That means housing bubble stories will continue in the national press long, long after the Phoenix real estate market has bottomed out and is back to normal.

When home prices go down 25 percent to 30 percent anywhere west of the Passiac River, it’s just a curiosity to the New York media. When their personal New York condo falls 5 percent in value, it will be the end of the world as we know it. And then their homes will fall another 5 percent… Oh, the humanity!

There will be no end to the whining stories coming out of New York. They shouldn’t expect too much sympathy, however, from California, Florida, Arizona, Nevada et al.

In the 1980′s I used to say that if home prices fell in Washington D.C. like they did in Houston Texas, there would have been a massive Federal housing program created as soon as the damage struck the policymakers’ homes.